A wide variety of entertainment kiosks are presently known, such as the Coinstar Redbox™ and the Blockbuster Express™, which provide digital media such as movies, music, games, books or the like for rental or purchase in the form of prerecorded material on CDs, DVDs, blue ray disks and the like.
FIG. 1 illustrates a prior art kiosk 100 for rental and sale of DVDs and the like, such as the NCR SelfServ Entertainment 2381 DVD rental kiosk. The kiosk employs a touch screen display 110, a magnetic stripe card reader 120, a display area 130 for physical display of movie promotional material, a dispensing slot 132 for dispensing media, such as DVDs, and a customer receipt slot 135 for delivery of a customer receipt printed by a receipt printer (not shown).
As another example of a prior art technique for providing digital media, one current digital media download approach is based on secure digital (SD) cards as the primary media. A digital download kiosk 200 for use with such cards is illustrated in FIG. 2. To use the kiosk 200, a customer inserts an SD card. The flash card memories therein follow a non-volatile memory format developed by Panasonic, San Disk and Toshiba for use in portable devices such as digital cameras, mobile phones, video game consoles and the like. Digital rights management (DRM) protection can be embedded in the secure SD card which can utilize the content protection for recordable media (CPRM) format to protect digital media stored in secure storage therein.
Digital download systems like the system of FIG. 2 have many advantages. For example, they provide the ability to offer a wide range of entertainment content stored on a media server without the challenges of transporting and stocking physical inventory. Additionally, they allow the use of well-established and accepted digital rights management methods, such as CPRM, which is widely employed in the secure digital card consumer electronics flash memory format. U.S. Pat. No. 7,779,064 describes details of distributing digitally encoded content, such as movies, music, computer games to kiosk-like content-delivery systems, such as kiosk 100, and is incorporated by reference herein in its entirety.
Approaches to downloading content onto a user's cell phone, laptop, flash drive or the like have also been developed. To date, such approaches have required the media to be written to a user's device which is connected to the source of the content or which is in close proximity thereto. In most cases, downloading has been significantly slower than desired.